Through the tall bank of windows in the dining room, you can see the cypress-lined bayou and, quite often, alligators roughly the size of sofas basking on the bank or lurking just by the water’s edge. People gaze over them from a safe remove, then get back to the seafood platters and gumbo on their tables.
It’s something like the floor show that comes with a meal at Restaurant des Familles in Crown Point, just over the bridge before Lafitte, that end-of-the-road fishing village deep in the wilds of Barataria.
Through the tale of this unique restaurant’s own travails and ultimate return, you can see something that runs deeper than the bayou.
Embedded in that story is the role that restaurants play in their community, and that community plays in the fate and future of restaurants, especially through tumult and hard times.
First, there was the fire, which struck late one July night in 2020, when restaurants were just reopening from the pandemic shutdowns. A year later, with fire repairs nearing completion, Hurricane Ida pushed about 5 feet of water through the restaurant.
But Restaurant des Familles is now finally fully back, in time for its 30th anniversary. Today, its proprietors Brooke and Bryan Zar say they likely would not have made it to this milestone without the push they got from regulars and their bayou neighbors.
The restaurant can seem an unlikely find, a genteel-looking roadhouse set amid teaming expenses of wilderness just outside the National Park Service Barataria Preserve. But this is a restaurant that's long been in sync with the communities that intersect here. Tourists come through, but mainly its locals, coming for anytime dinners down the road, corporate functions and family outings. Kids come for prom night and ring night, and some couples have standing weekday lunch dates at the bar.
Life in these communities is still greatly impacted by Ida and its slow-going recovery. But now one part of that it, a destination Louisiana restaurant, is back for that community to convene.
